Film allows us to examine ourselves in ways earlier societies could not—examine ourselves, imitate ourselves, extend ourselves, reshape our reality. It permeates our lives, this double vision, and also detaches us, turns some of us into actors doing walk-throughs.
–Don DeLillo, Interview with Adam Begley
My real dependency is on the fantasies and the images that enable them, and thus on any technology that can make images fantastic. Make no mistake. We are de- pendent on image-technology; and the better the tech, the harder we’re hooked.
–David Foster Wallace, ―E. Unibus Pluram‖
This chapter‘s purpose is to interrogate the ways in which the human subject interacts with the televisual delivery of narrative in the works of Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace. The DeLillo novels under examination, White Noise and Underworld, published in 1985 and 1997, respectively, exemplify the representation of TV in the era of plenty, to use a term from media theory/TV studies. Furthermore, the kind of subjectivity DeLillo describes is configured around what John Ellis calls the witness, an ontological position that turns on the notion that we as subjects living in the age of Broadcast TV, can no longer claim not to know, not to be aware, for everything is now within our televisual purview. In Infinite Jest, however, set in a near future (which would be roughly now), Wallace presciently describes the failure of Broadcast TV and
the rise of a system wherein viewers have unlimited choice, thus situating this text in the era of abundance/uncertainty. This state of affairs creates, I argue, a new ontological position stem- ming from the witness, which I am calling the ―director ontology,‖ a positionality characterized by increased choice and decreased dependence on Broadcast flow.17
Television plays a major role in this chapter, so I feel that I should give a brief summa- tion of some of the trends in media theory that will help explain or fill in some blanks regarding the theoretical frameworks I explore here. By no means do I pretend to be giving a thorough ac- count of media theory, but I do hope to uncover some of the spots in current scholarship that will help ground this discussion.
Scholars disagree about what TV‘s effects may be, but they do seem to agree that TV is an important part of our lives. I will highlight the ways in which we interact with and form a re- lationship with TV, particularly insofar as TV has become the narrator to which we most often turn. TV plays many roles, but the one most important for our purposes, and arguably the most prevalent role generally, is that of what Milly Buonanno calls the ―supernarrator‖ (71). Buonan- no insists that understanding not only how important stories are to our very identities, but also TV‘s role in the delivery of those stories, is a crucial step in considering TV‘s effects on viewers:
We need to take stories seriously: they are our fairytales and myths, our moral tales, the burning fire of imagination whose flame, as Walter Benjamin said, gives warmth to our cold and wretched life. This applies to all the systems and forms of storytelling that have succeeded and joined one another in the history of human
17
John Fiske understands flow, a concept put forth by Raymond Williams, to mean ―that television is a continuous succession of images which follows no laws of logic or cause and effect, but which constitutes the cultural expe- rience of ‗watching television‘‖ (99). Fiske asserts that the concept of flow alludes to two characteristics of TV, the associative sequence of images with constant interruption (99) and TV‘s continuous nature (100).
society: they have not replaced each other, but from time to time they re-arranged themselves around a central narrative system, which in the second half of the twentieth century undeniably materialized and expressed itself in television. (71) This passage highlights the commonplace (but important) fact that narrative is central to human life, but more importantly it reminds us that TV is the primary place to which we turn for those narratives. Buonanno‘s notion of the supernarrator builds on the work of John Fiske and John Ellis, both leading scholars of TV studies. In Television Culture, John Fiske calls TV ―a funda-
mental cultural process‖ and points out that TV‘s predominate mode is ―narrational‖ (130). In
Visible Fictions, Ellis argues that TV and cinema ―are involved in a process of renewal or re-
freshment of society‘s layers of commonsense, its basic understandings of the universe‖ (14). Genre TV, he argues, provides a way of structuring and organizing the world (14-16). Fiske and Ellis both highlight the importance of narrative as well as the importance of TV in delivering narrative to viewers.
TV‘s role as supernarrator is not limited to fictional programming. Even (and perhaps especially) news programming delivers information via narrative. As John Ellis puts it, ―[e]ach item of news is always already part of a story‖ (76). Indeed, Ellis argues that the narrative quali- ty of news programming is central to understanding its societal function. The dissemination of information regarding current events is meaningless without contextualization within a narrative framework. That is, ―[n]ews should be understood in terms of story-telling and speculation about the future. But more often than not, the news story offers merely one possible narrative and framework of understanding from amongst all the others that are possible. Though news narrates, it does not conclude‖ (78). In short, Ellis insists, ―[t]elevision can be seen as a vast me- chanism for processing the material of the witnessed world into more narrativized, explained fo-
cus‖ (78). John Fiske agrees, arguing that television drama is not the only, or even the most pre- valent form of TV narrative; rather, most TV programming is narrational to at least some degree. He argues that news programming, documentaries, sports and quiz shows, commercials, and mu- sic videos are some of the varied forms of narrative we might find on Broadcast TV. He goes so far as to suggest that ―arguably only music lacks a narrative structure, and even that has similari- ties in its ability to structure time‖ (130). Through both fictional and non-fictional programming, then, TV narrates our lives individually and collectively. TV thus becomes our shared con- sciousness as well as our shared unconscious, a receptacle for our collective fears, desires, and secrets.
It is toward this collective unconscious that Ellis directs his argument. He explains his choice of the phrase ―working through‖ as being ―drawn deliberately from psychoanalysis‖ (78- 79). Freud conceptualized ―working through‖ as the process an individual undertakes to break down the resistances that the psyche has erected in an effort to recover. In his 1914 essay, ―Re- collection, Repetition, and Working Through,‖ Freud emphasizes that ―one must allow the pa- tient time to get to this resistance of which he is ignorant, to ‗work through‘ it, to overcome it, by continuing the work according to the analytic rule in defiance of it‖ (165). The process involves the conscious mind‘s participation in understanding the unconscious mind insofar as it can, but more importantly, the process builds from that understanding. Ellis says that the process of working through is ―significantly helped by the new graphic nature of electronic image processing‖ (2). He argues that TV finds itself in the position of working through those re- pressed elements of collectively shared subjectivity: ―It works over new material for its au- diences as a necessary consequence of its position as witness. Television attempts definitions, tries out explanations, creates narratives, talks over, makes intelligible, tries to marginalize, har-
nesses speculation, tries to make fit, and very occasionally anathemizes‖ (79). Ellis argues that as we witness more, we must in turn engage more in the process of working through the litany of ―incomprehensible or inadmissible human behavior[s]‖ (80). While Ellis only provides one ex- ample, watching executions in other countries, he implicitly suggests that we might form our own inventory of what we consider ―incomprehensible or inadmissible human behavior.‖ For Ellis, then, TV facilitates our growth as a collective, as a culture. Through placing these re- pressed elements repeatedly into various narratives—fictional or otherwise—we begin to process them (psychoanalytically) at a collective level.
Positioning TV as narrator necessitates re-seeing, first, TV‘s own ontological status and then our relation with TV. That is, TV becomes more than an object to us. To think of TV as narrator is to give it a sort of agency, even subjectivity. The way we interact with it, then, be- comes something more than a subject/object relationship. Jonathan Gray even compares TV to a sibling, affirming that TV, in the contemporary imaginary, is more than an object; it is practically family (53). Indeed, TV‘s identity—its for-itself-ness—is one of the things catalyzing our own ever-under-revision subjectivities. From the early days of television, critical approaches to the medium have paid a great deal of attention to the relationship the viewer creates with TV and its components. The first comprehensive book-length study of TV, Ira Glick and Sidney J. Levy‘s
Living with Television, first published in 1962, begins with these words:
This book is about television viewers—about how they use the medium and how they feel about it [. . .]. The viewer remains the focus of attention throughout the book; and it is the authors‘ purpose to assess what meanings television has for him, to describe why he comes to use it as he does, and the particular ways in which he establishes a relationship with it. (15, emphasis added)
This approach to critical examinations of TV, unlike similar approaches in literary studies (read- er response, reception, and phenomenological theories), remains prevalent in current scholarship, suggesting that the relationship we form with TV is more complex and worthy of study than the relationship we form with print fiction18. We might form relationships with individual stories or books, but we do not, for example, form a relationship with print fiction‘s closest analogue to the TV, the bookshelf. This is the case in part because the limited, static nature of the bookshelf is not, like the TV, inherently always changing, always in process. It is precisely this different em- bodiment that delivers the crucial change that catalyzes the shift in our own ontologies. We command a machine to tell us stories, narrate our bidding, and that changes us.19 Whether we are subject (or subjected) to Broadcast TV, as we see in DeLillo, or engaging in a more directori- al role through narrowcasting and conditional access, as we see in Wallace, we turn to this su- pernarrator to give us the templates by which we model our lives. That is, the TV, again unlike the bookshelf, becomes the Other (or at least an Other) around whose reciprocal gaze we narrate our subjectivities.
In his thorough examination of TV culture, Fiske highlights the role of the viewer and the process of viewing. Drawing from Umberto Eco‘s notions of open and closed texts and from Roland Barthes‘s notions of readerly and writerly texts, Fiske puts forward the notion of TV as a ―producerly text,‖ or a text that is collaboratively written and whose composition includes ele- ments beyond that of a print text (45). The author is of secondary importance here, largely be-
18
For example, scholars such as Cornell Sandvoss, Henry Jenkins, and Jonathan Gray look specifically at relation- ships between text and audience.
19
To be fair, this difference might also signify a more conservative strand dominating literary studies, one that privi- leges the text and the author (despite poststructuralist dethroning of the author) over any role the reader plays in the process of meaning-making.
cause there is no longer any one author. The entire industry of creating and distributing TV pro- gramming is brought to bear on potential interpretations—and the interpretability—of TV texts.
Looking at the medium as well as at specific TV texts, we can see that TV affects how we form, conceptualize, and communicate our identities. Jonathan Gray argues that ―loving, lik- ing, hating, or disliking television is never just about the show and/or about an engagement with fiction—such responses are intimately about, and hence can be read to make sense of, our identi- ty as individuals and communities, and our engagement with the very real here and now‖ (Gray, emphasis in original 13). As Gray would have it, then, the relationship we form with TV is more than simply the relationship we form to story itself; TV‘s role as supernarrator enables us to form a relationship with TV and an identity largely defined by the stories the TV tells. He goes on to argue that ―[a]ffective relationships to television entertainment quite often act as key identity markers, coloring our experience of television entertainment, for affect can amplify textual prop- erties, erase them, or otherwise modify them. Affect determines what television is and what it does‖ (46). Even as we are determining TV‘s identity, Gray suggests, TV is determining ours. Gray reminds us that fantasy and escape are still in the service of the real, for we are constantly creating ourselves with help from narrative communities and worlds (58-61). This reciprocal relationship between TV and our ever-forming identities is, Gray suggests, a product of contem- porary life, as well as a determinant in how we inhabit it (48). Attending to the ways in which TV and viewer identities are mutually and recursively constitutive can help us understand how TV has affected us on both ontological and epistemological levels.
Out of our relationship with TV, then, emerges a new kind of subjectivity, or as John El- lis puts it, ―a new modality of perception‖—the witness (ST 1). The witness, according to Ellis,
deed, practically forced) for consumption through TV, we can no longer claim to be ignorant about anything within the purview of TV. He argues that ―[p]hotography, radio and film all bring us into contact with this process of witness, but television has given it a purer definition because it makes an aesthetic promise that it is live, even though that promise is indifferently filled‖ (10). This ―aesthetic promise,‖ hinged on the veracity of truly witnessing live events (which is only sometimes the case) gives us as viewers a constant stream of events to consume, and more importantly, digest. Ellis stresses that, while the process of witness is not tantamount to being present and is never unmediated, the knowledge of events that witnessing generates creates a sort of complicity with those events (9-11). Coupled with this notion of the witness, Ellis argues, is consumer society as the defining feature of our material conditions of existence. Implicit in his argument is a sort of split subject arising from our relationship with TV—our on- tology is one of the witness and our epistemology is firmly rooted in a consumer model of self- situating. For Ellis, the combination of the witness ontology and a consumer-driven epistemolo- gy results in ―constant worrying over issues and emotions, dealing with the feelings of witness through the presentation of a riot of ways of understanding the world without ever coming to any final conclusions‖ (2). This witness ontology, Ellis claims, puts viewers in the position of con- stantly trying to put the array of data we consume into narrative frameworks that help us make sense of the data; meanwhile, the commercial imperative is to keep viewers in the role of con- sumers. By this logic, witnessing must be inextricably linked to commercial interests. The for- mer acknowledges our drive to narrate. The latter takes up the narration as a task to be per- formed in order to keep the consumer machinery running. We, that is, want stories, and com- mercial interests ensure that we get them. The narratives the commercial interests spin, however, are always firmly within the control of the dominant ideology. We get the stories that the domi-
nant ideology deems safe enough for mass consumption. Even resistant texts that work against the dominant ideology still uphold that ideology by virtue of their participation in the distribution model itself.
While the witness ontology adequately represents the viewer of TV in the novels by De- Lillo, we see a shift in Wallace‘s work, for he begins to predict the wide scale transition from broadcasting to narrowcasting. The viewer of ―Entertainments‖ in Infinite Jest is able to create
her own programming because she has unlimited choice in content as well as context. The view- er becomes more a director than simply a witness. Here, then, we need to attend to another of Ellis‘s concepts—choice fatigue. Choice fatigue, Ellis argues, is
the feeling that choices are simply too difficult; a nostalgia for pattern, habit and era when choices seemed few. Choice fatigue is a combination of impatience, a modern vice, and the sense of simply not wanting to be bothered [. . .]. There are moments when choice is an imposition rather than a freedom. Broadcast televi- sion answers to this feeling. (171)
In other words, broadcasting offers us the opportunity to turn on the TV and let the TV industry decide for us what we will watch, relieving us of the burden of making that decision. Milly Bu- onanno fleshes out Ellis‘s adumbration of choice fatigue, highlighting the dramatic shift from broadcasting to narrowcasting (23). She teases out the implications of ever-advancing digital technologies that allow the viewer more freedom from the strictures of network broadcast televi- sion. The shift from broadcasting to narrowcasting leads to tremendous diversification of prod- ucts. Coupled with this diversification is the changing ways in which we access television. That is, Broadcast TV no longer holds sway; rather, prescription access, or what Buonanno calls ―conditional access‖ to TV has become the norm (62). In addition, there are now more ways of
viewing television. Personal video recorders, video on demand, DVDs, and similar technologies allow us to view when we want to view rather than when programs air, and the internet is now a viable and growing point of access for much television programming. Beyond prescription access, Buonanno points out, we are also now seeing what she calls ―inter-media cooperation,‖